[Users] Introduction

[Arnie Shore]

Hello all.  Here's a bit re me and my interest in this group.

I'm the chief cook and bottle-washer on a (mostly!) open source project (see
www.ticketsCAD.org) that offers a free, Open Source PHP application that's
gotten some traction in the public-safety worlds, where computer-aided
dispatch - CAD below - can play a major role in day-to-day operation.
(You'll see CAD in virtually every local government jurisdiction,  as well
as at private ambulance/emergency-response companies, ham radio clubs
supporting significant events, etc., etc.)

For those unfamiliar with CAD,  it may well be the application that's the
single largest consumer of geo-data, and it's been doing that for a looooong
time now.  While CAD is a mature application in general - there's n
commercial instances of it out in the wild - there's a significant $
requirement on these, and the smaller teams therefore result to spreadsheets
and yellow stickies.  We've attracted a significant number of users from
non-US locations as one of the results of the $ factor.

Back to our project, which is about six years old now.  Tickets currently
uses GMaps as its geo component, and a number of users - actual as well as
potential - balk at Google's TOU, and we're planning a transition to
OSM/OL.  We expect two versions; one with local/server storage of the
tiles/files - for operation while 'the balloon is up'  - while the other
will pull tiles from any available OSM source.

The geo requirement will be satisfied for the local/server  version by a
TMS-based directory structure, rather than a geo-server of some kind.  (I
have a trivial OL script that works well in our sandbox, so we have a
smidgen of experience so far.)  Tickets is PHP/MySQL-based, and we're
sticking with that.

Besides geo, the other tall pole in our tent is data handling, so a strong
data-grid capability is important.  I'm looking for a library or framework
that includes these two, and GEOext looks as least as good as any of the
alternatives I've looked at out there, so here I am!

My concern - at least at the moment - is WRT keeping the ext versions
required by the several components in synch. Comments solicited.
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